Last week, Google announced a new feature for Google Reader that is worth noting here, if only because it will make my work a little easier. They’ve introduced the idea of ‘bundles’ of feeds that anyone can create and share via Google Reader, email, OPML or as an Atom feed. There was a bit of confusion at first about what happened after you create a bundle and shared it. Dave Winer, based on an exchange with Kevin Marks, thought that the bundles were dynamic ‘reading lists’ based on a proprietary format. This isn’t the case but it’s worth reading Dave Winer’s original post with comments, and his follow up post which clarifies what reading lists are (technically, they’re ‘subscription lists‘ – part of the OPML 2.0 specification).
Anyway, what Google has introduced in this update to their feed reader is still very useful and functionally quite similar to the reading list concept. It allows me to group multiple feeds into a set/reading list/bundle and then share that set of feeds with my Google Reader ‘friends’, email a link to a web page of that bundle or download an OPML file of the bundle. This last feature is particularly cool because it means your bundle is portable via the OPML open standard and can be shared beyond Google Reader.
Effectively, Google Reader has become a simple OPML editor, allowing anyone to gather feeds together and export them as an OPML file. Even better, your bundle is also available as a ‘blended’ Atom feed, achieving something similar to Dave Winer’s notion of a dynamic ‘reading list’ where the creator of the bundle can add or remove feeds and the Atom feed is dynamically updated to reflect those changes. Until now it was a bit of a hassle to create a blended feed from multiple sources. Yahoo! Pipes is a powerful way of doing it but Pipes isn’t for everyone and I’ve found the feeds it produces are not always available and compatible with other feed reading applications. Recently, I’ve been creating ‘digests’ in feed.informer, but I’m more inclined to use Google Reader now as it’s where I do all my feed reading and I know the application well. Note that you don’t have to remain subscribed to the feed in Google Reader in order for a bundle to remain persistent either. You can create a bundle from feeds you later unsubscribe from in your reader and the feeds are not deleted from the bundle.
There are two obvious uses for all of this. First, a teacher could bundle a reading list of feeds and share them with students via Google Reader, as a simple web page, an OPML file or dynamic Atom feed. Second, using the Atom output, it’s now easy for anyone to create a lifestream feed of all their activity on the web and embed it on their web page or just archive it in Google Reader or elsewhere.
The blended feeds sound like a good idea, but blimey Google doesn’t make it easy to find this new feature – it’s under “Browse for stuff” then at the bottom right there’s a button to “Create a bundle”.